Concepts vs Direct Perception

SHAMBHAVI
So right before satsang, we were talking about that I had a booster shot and had days of quite ill health after the booster shot. And that I had gotten a funny kind of omen about it that there was going to be some kind of crisis. And Charandas said, "I thought you weren't affected by crises" [laughter], like everyone else.

And then we had a little back and forth about that and then I said, you've known me for a long time. You see me, you feel me. Why are you thinking about me? Why don't you just see me and feel?

So of course, thinking I thought you weren't affected by crises is based on a concept.

There's a background to that of, Oh! She's a spiritual teacher. She has been, done a lot of sadhana. She's supposed to be in this certain condition that I have come up with on my own somehow. You know, that [laughter] she's not going to be affected by crises.

Who even knows what that means? But in any case, the point is that we have a lot of concepts about other people and how other people should be and how they shouldn't be.

And what happens when we have those kind of concepts is that we look for people who validate our concepts, or we just project our concepts onto them.

And then when someone deviates from that, we become disappointed or we become angry or we feel abandoned or we feel hurt. Or I thought you were supposed to be something or other. Or I thought you weren't supposed to be something or other.

But the thing is that you've manufactured this whole thing in your head [laughter]. You have a concept of how people should be or shouldn't be. And then you're looking to see if they match up to that or not.

Or you assume that they do, like if someone has a title. You know, someone is doctor so and so, a family doctor. They're supposed to care about your health.

Well, maybe they don't, right!

I went to an ophthalmologist, a couple of months ago, who was a complete charlatan. And this was actually confirmed for me by another ophthalmologist I went to for a second opinion. I said I went to somebody first, but she really seemed like a charlatan. And he said, oh! Dr. so and so, he immediately knew whom I was talking about [laughter].

So if I had gone into that with this very firm concept and doctors are supposed to care about us. They're not supposed to just try to sell us expensive things. And they're not supposed to lie to us about what condition we're in, so they can sell us these very expensive things, which is what happened.

Luckily, I didn't believe her and I didn't buy the very expensive thing. But if I had had a firm hand on a concept like that, then what would I have felt?

I would have felt very hurt. I might have felt outraged. I might have, like, spent weeks being angry about it. Right?

But instead, because I don't have that concept [slaps hands] about how anyone is going to be or not going to be. I mean, I was a little annoyed that I wasted my time. But I didn't—do anything to me emotionally that she was a charlatan.

Same thing if we go to a spiritual teacher. We have some idea of how a spiritual teacher is supposed to be.

And then, of course, a lot of spiritual teachers actually play into that. They know that you think that [laughter]. They know that you have all these concepts about spiritual teachers. They've read the same books you have: the same cheat sheets about how you're supposed to act if you're enlightened.

And you know, mostly these very transcendental pictures of how people are supposed to be when they've done a lot of practice.

And there's a lot of famous teaching stories in the direct realization traditions about this, where students have these concepts about how their teacher is. Even if their teacher doesn't say that, that's how they are.

Teacher doesn't smoke. Teacher doesn't drink. Teacher doesn't have sex. Teacher never lies. Teacher has a magnificently cared for house. Teacher is very erudite.

And then, whatever these ideas we might have, very saintly. We come into situations with teachers with these received ideas that may or may not have anything to do with that person's practice or lineage or how they are.

And then teachers will use this in the direct realization traditions to pull the rug out from under you and kind of shock you. And there are many, many, many stories about this, to try to like, shock you out of your concepts about people.

There's a famous Daoist teaching story where, a student has been with his teacher for a very long time, and he's about to kind of graduate.

But he still has these concepts about his teacher that haven't gone away. And so the teacher invites him over for dinner, and he's never been over to his teacher's house for dinner before. So he gets all dressed up, he brings a little gift and he knocks on the door and hears some shuffling behind the door.

And the teacher kind of opens it and teacher's, like, not shaved, got a cigarette dangling out of his mouth and he smells boozy [laughter].

And he was like, [shouts] come on in! [laughter] And then there's like some woman in the kitchen, cooking, you know, meet my wife. And the student is absolutely outraged and horrified and shocked.

But the end of these stories is always that the student recognizes that they had been holding these concepts and how useless it is.

We are supposed to be meeting reality as it is.

We're supposed to be seeing and feeling and smelling and tasting reality, how it is, in fresh and new in every moment. Not coming to each other or to our teachers or to people with letters after their name, thinking this is how they should be.

Most of the suffering in relationships is caused because we come to them with expectations and projections.

And those things are like screens in front of our eyes or like Coke bottle lenses or dark colored glasses that we don't see through clearly. Because the projection is in the way of actually seeing how someone is.

And this is why, as I've said so many times before, you know, there's people that have spiritual teachers and think they're totally enlightened, and you or I wouldn't even want to have lunch with these teachers. I mean, they're so obviously awful.

This is why some people can see what's going on, and some people cannot.

Because of these projections and conceptions and expectations. They actually cloud and distort our view, our experience, our direct experience of things.

That's why it's very important to try to come to our relationships with each other in a community, and with me, and with anyone we meet, with freshness and with our senses, not with our what we think about things. This is the key.

So many times we suffer, we suffer because we come to things with projections and expectations and conceptions.

STUDENT 1
What we sense in another person though, it ends up becoming part of our conceptual mind once it comes back in.

SHAMBHAVI
Not when our senses are open. No, that's the whole point of practice, is to open our senses, so that our senses are not being filtered through our karmic projections.

STUDENT 1
Are you including mind as a sense in that?

SHAMBHAVI
Yeah! Mind, but not the mind of concepts, not the mind of intellect, not the mind of categorization and labeling.

The mind that sees clearly and directly. It's a different kind of mind. You have a direct insight, right? about someone or some situation, that's mind. But it's not clouded by labels and concepts and categories and conceptions.

Maybe some of you have an experience of this kind of vision, maybe you don't. But you will. You keep practicing and you will.

You know things about me from your own experience that are true, right? I mean, those are real perceptions. That I am unaffected by crises is not a real perception [laughter].

I think the best thing to understand is that there are ways in which we express our karmas that perpetuate those karmas.

For instance, if I feel chronically abandoned by friends and lovers, and no matter what situation I'm in, I feel abandoned. And what I do in those situations is I rehearse that abandonment over and over and over and over again in conversations with anyone who will listen—that is like being a hamster on a wheel. You're not getting anywhere!

You're just reinforcing your view of reality that you've been abandoned. But if you start to sort of get off the wheel and look at that pattern as a pattern, and it's not necessarily what's actually happening.

Not that people don't get abandoned. But I'm just saying, if you have a chronic pattern like this, it's unlikely that everyone you know is abandoning you.

A chronic expressing the pattern as if it were real and should be taken very very seriously. And if you should be taken at your word as to what's going on, that is the hamster wheel.

But getting behind that and seeing what's really actually giving rise to that is what we want to do.

So then you can express what your real emotion is. For instance, someone might express rage. People who are trying to avoid humiliation and shame often do so by becoming enraged at other people. This is very, very common.

They deflect from their own fear of humiliation or feeling of humiliation by criticizing being angry at other people.

So if you're telling me, I'm so angry at so and so or whatever you're saying. And I understand that what you're actually feeling is fear of being humiliated, what I'm going to try to do is get to that!

I'm not interested in your 18,000th story about what someone else did wrong. That's just keeping that pattern going.

I'm interested in the fact that you feel very vulnerable and fragile and that you're afraid of being humiliated. And I'm interested in you feeling that, so that you don't have to be an ass to other people [laughter].

So when I said that to you when you first were coming around, I probably meant you're just rehearsing your fixations.

You're not really talking about what's really bothering you.

You know, someone who is very anxious about planning, always needs to know what's going to happen. What's underneath that anxiety?

If someone always wants to know what's going to happen, which is, of course, a futile endeavor [laughter].

But if I spend my time with that person, always trying to soothe them by participating in this fantasy game of planning out what's going to happen and predicting what's going to happen and pretending to know what's going to happen, then all I'm doing is feeding their habit pattern.

But what's underneath that is a fear of death, a fear of the unknown, a fear of the flow of time, fear of impermanence, fear of not being in control, fear of not being right, fear of not being perfect, fear of making a mistake.

All of these things are underneath that, and that's what we have to go for. That's what we have to try to feel.

There's, like endless examples of this, of course. We can turn just about anything into an identity formation. Because we are trying to solidify a sense of self, and we will solidify a sense of self around anything [laughs].

I don't know those people eat jiffy popcorn [laughter]. I mean, who are they? [laughter]. That's like an identity formation.

Basically, I'm saying, I'm not like them. I eat gourmet popcorn or whatever.

So whenever we do anything other than care about people and love people, we are dividing things into categories so that we can define the category of ourself, whatever that looks like in the moment.

It's also inescapable that we would do this, until we have direct perception of how reality actually is. It's a secondary effect of how fragile we feel.

Somewhere in us, even very unconsciously, we recognize that there really isn't much here. We're always like, I have to find myself. I have to define myself. I have to defend myself. I have to have boundaries. I have to have this that and the other.

And all of this is just basically like, Oh my God! There's not really much here, to, there's not really any ground, oh no! There's some like, feeling that we know that.

Even if—Ramana Maharshi folks, they love to do these very kind of rationalistic little mind exercises [laughs]. They say stuff, so go inside and try to find the eye.

It's so simplistic. Like, there's nothing in there.

Unless you look for that experience of living presence, which happens to be everywhere [laughs]. There's nothing that's contained in this, that we could really solidify around.

And so, we solidify around all these other things. How we eat? How we look? What work we have? How much money we have? Who our friends are? Our kids, our houses, our cars, our country, our family, our religion, our political party, our opinions about isms, osms and ogynies.

We solidify around all of this stuff, in order to assuage that basic perception of the complete impermanence of everything [laughter].

And the antidote is not to like, finger wag at everybody about impermanence. It's to begin to touch that living presence and begin to appreciate the beauty and the magic of impermanence.

And to be able to have the direct experience that, that is arising from the eternal.

And when we can do that, we can still play with all of these different forms of life, if we want. But we're no longer attached to them as identity formations and so then we're no longer feeling superior to anyone.